Microtiter plates have become a standard tool in chemistry, biology and medical laboratories. The plates are typically flat glass or plastic trays in which an array of circular reagent wells are formed. Each well can typically hold between from a few microliters to hundreds of microliters of fluid reagents and samples, which may be loaded into the wells with automated delivery equipment. Plate readers are used to detect biological, chemical and/or physical events in the fluids placed in each well.
As the fields of combinatorial chemistry and high throughput screening have grown, so has equipment and laboratory instrumentation that has been designed to fill, manipulate and read microtiter plates. Unfortunately, the equipment makers made little effort develop systems that were cross-compatible with the systems of other manufacturers. By the mid-1990s, the Society for Biomolecular Screening (SBS) formed a standards group to address these cross-compatibility problems. A final set of standards was published by SBS and the American National Standards Institute 2003.
These standards define the overall dimensions of a compliant microtiter plate, as well as the diameter, depth and spacing of the reagent wells in the plate. The plates may include 96, 384, 1536, etc., wells arranged in a 2:3 rectangular matrix. While some manufacturers have made plates packing even larger numbers of reagent wells into the dimensions of an SBS-formatted plate, the small-sizes of the wells can make filling and reading the plates more difficult. Thus, there is a need for devices, systems and methods that can rapidly and accurately deliver small volumes of samples and reagents to reaction sites in high throughput microtiter plates. There is also a need for devices, systems and methods that provide monitoring, detecting and reading of reactions performed at the reaction sites of such microtiter plates. There is also a need to design such microtiter plates to SBS compatible standards, so they can take advantage of the large amount of SBS-formatted equipment and instrumentation that is currently in use. These and other needs are addressed by the present invention.